HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Her ball cap pulled low, Samantha Steele stepped out of the conference room at a beach side hotel on a recent Thursday afternoon.

Arriving in South Florida late the previous night, ESPN’s rising star was running a fever and her suitcase was packed for winter. By 7:30 that evening, Steele went live from the Sun Life Stadium sidelines as Miami beat Virginia Tech.

It’s a new city every day for the Phoenix native, who is dating Vikings quarterback Christian Ponder. She hasn’t been home in a month. Exhaustion is setting in.

But it’s where this crazy ride started that sets Steele apart from the other young broadcasting talents. Her ascent in the sports broadcasting world led Steele to the Thursday night sideline reporting gig. By Saturday morning, she was in Baton Rouge as part of the College GameDay crew setting the scene for then-No. 1 Alabama at LSU, which was then ranked fifth.

Prefacing her story by acknowledging how “ridiculous” her path is, Steele starts at the beginning.

“I didn’t have cable growing up,” said Steele in one of her first interviews since being called up to the big leagues. “I never saw ESPN or GameDay. I thought I wanted to be on ESPN, but I didn’t know what the heck it was. I knew it was sports television, but we didn’t have it. We didn’t really watch TV growing up. This was definitely beyond my scope of imagination.”

One of four children with a coach for a father, Steele grew up playing sports more than watching it. From soccer to softball, she was either competing or cheering on a family member.

It was a way of life that didn’t involve hours in front of the television.

“We would watch Monday Night Football and I remember seeing some ABC games with Keith Jackson on a Saturday,” she said in her best Keith Jackson voice. “But, for the most part, we were always out playing. There wasn’t time for all that.”

So, as the culture she’d one day occupy gained steam, Steele lived in a parallel universe that intersected in a place known as the Crossroads of the World.

And this is where it gets interesting.

At 18, she got the itch and moved cross country to New York City. No job. No connections.

“So I went to the ESPN Zone in Times Square and applied to be a hostess,” she said. “This was my thought process, this is how naive I was. I thought there would be ESPN people coming in there because it’s the ESPN Zone.”

Of course, she was hired and the wide world of cable television was literally at her every turn. With a view of Macy’s department story out her apartment window, she made the daily walk up Broadway to work. It wasn’t quite the glamour gig.

Living off the Wendy’s coupons her mother mailed, Steele was locked into one goal.

“I wanted to be Ahmad Rashad,” she said of the host she watched on NBC’s NBA Inside Stuff. “If I got to New York, I could be Ahmad Rashad. I had no clue how that all worked.”

But Steele soon found out. Just two months into seating customers in midtown Manhattan, she met someone with ABC Sports Radio. Her admittedly half-baked idea actually worked and soon Steele was an intern at the network. That led to a researcher-assistant job with ABC-TV on the college football studio show.

“It’s so crazy because people thought I was an idiot, which I was,” she said. “But apparently some part of that plan made sense.”

After two-and-a-half years and “probably 17 roommates,” Steele stepped out of the shadows and moved away from New York.

Her first sideline reporting job came at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where she graduated in 2009. Working for the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), Steele developed the on-air presence that’s now cultivating her fame one broadcast at a time.

She’s quick with her wit, and shows no apprehension trying something new. After working for Fox Sports for two years, Steele moved over to ESPN and its Texas-themed Longhorn Network last year. Her presence grew rapidly into occasional sideline reporting for non-Texas games.

The call to the farm team then came before this season, after a major piece of its broadcast team moved on. Erin Andrews’ July switch to the Fox network opened a GameDay roster spot soon filled by Steele. She also picked up the co-hosting job on the 9 a.m. ESPNU GameDay show once occupied by Andrews.

Thus began the whirlwind.

Averaging eight flights a week, Steele criss-crosses the country filming GameDay features and reporting from sidelines. Her improvisational skills were best showcased taping her most popular segment to date, Trick Shot Monday at Notre Dame.

Flying in just a few hours of filming, Steele participated in the weekly team tradition of bouncing a ping pong ball into a plastic cup using walls, foreheads — anything available.

Adding her own twist at the end, Steele doused Irish lineman Mike Golic Jr. with the water cup at the end as his teammates went bananas. That part came naturally. The live GameDay shows in front of a wild audience came as a shock.

She’d never seen the show before stepping onto the stage this fall. Saturdays were always filled with game prep. The show was almost a foreign concept.

“I know,” she said with a knowing smile. “It’s weird.”

Steele’s Thursday night crew members have no shortage of Sam stories after a few months on the road.

They tease her for adventures in travel-time management as the new routine becomes a lifestyle. Rece Davis, who calls the game from the booth, calls Steele the “anti-diva.”

“She likes the game,” Davis said. “She’s not just about getting her face time — though I’m sure the viewers would like it if she got more — she’s about being part of the team and she’s great at that. She’s fit in perfectly and we respect her as a journalist and her knowledge and ability, but we also like take care of her. David is sort of the older brother. I’m not going to be dad, but I’ll be the older uncle. I’m not dad yet.”

Joshua Hoffman, the ESPN Thursday night producer, vividly remembers his first conversation with Steele in July.

“We both share a distaste for the typical fluff sideline story,” he said. “I had no interest in her doing that and she was very clear that she didn’t want to be that. Her focus all year was doing reports based on what she could see that we couldn’t see based on being down there. … To me, that spoke of experience.”

As with anyone new to an established group, hazing is part of the ritual. And Steele can dish it right back to her male co-workers.

David Pollack, another member of the booth team, then pointed to the quote list she keeps in her iPhone.

“It’s interesting, her quotes magically don’t appear on the quote board,” said Pollack, who Steele jokingly called her “annoying older brother.”

All teasing aside, they recognize the talent in the newest member of the team. Davis remembers sitting in the studio with Mark May one Friday night last season watching Steele do a broadcast.

“We both looked at each other and said she’s a star,” Davis said.

The ‘overwhelming’ adjustment

By Thursday morning, the jet-setting life was catching up to Steele.

Last minute, she was flown to Tuscaloosa on Tuesday night to shoot a day-long look inside the Alabama program. Scott Van Pelt had the original assignment, but Hurricane Sandy left him stranded in the Northeast.

So it was Steele who rode shotgun on Nick Saban’s Wednesday morning drive to the office. By that evening, she was landing in sunny Miami with a heavy coat and a fever.

“I think if somebody would have told me the schedule, it would have sounded so overwhelming, I would have thought there was no way,” Steele said. “But once you get in, you get into survival mode. And you just go.”

That’s not a complaint, she quickly added. She couldn’t imagine a better job, even if she grew up unaware of its existence. From week to week, the experiences are priceless and the comparisons to her predecessor are unavoidable.

“At games, I always feel like such a disappointment to people,” Steele said. “People yell out ‘Erin!’ and I turn around and I’m like ‘Sorry, guys. Sorry to disappoint.’ Or I get little kids, I’m sure their dad sends them over or something, and they’re like ‘Hi Erin, can I get a picture?’ And I’m like ‘Guys, I’m so sorry, but you have no idea who I am and I don’t blame you.'”

That won’t last.

Andrews crossed over into mainstream fame that included a season on “Dancing with the Stars.”

“The funny thing that still cracks me up is when you get a grown man coming up to you shaking asking for a picture,” Steele said. “I’m like ‘Dude, you know I’m a scrub, right?’ I’m still about as regular people as they come. You can find me sleeping on the floor at Terminal B at the Atlanta airport any time.”

Then it’s off to the next game at the center of the college football world. She’s a long way from Times Square right now. As her star grows, Steele can still laugh when fans still ask for her name along with a picture.

“Good freaking question,” she says. “I’ve been asking myself that for quite some time.”

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